books.google.com - Expansive herbaceous borders, orchid-filled meadows enveloped by old stone, precision-carved topiary, and an air of gentle eccentricity make Great Dixter the quintessential English country garden. Yet the impact of Christopher Lloyd's unique creation extends way beyond the gardening world and affects...https://books.google.com/books/about/The_View_from_Great_Dixter.html?id=rOTHsrI3-wwC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareThe View from Great Dixter

The View from Great Dixter: Christopher Lloyd's Garden Legacy

Expansive herbaceous borders, orchid-filled meadows enveloped by old stone, precision-carved topiary, and an air of gentle eccentricity make Great Dixter the quintessential English country garden. Yet the impact of Christopher Lloyd's unique creation extends way beyond the gardening world and affects all who pass through it in a very particular way.

In this intimate collection of written and photographic contributions, Christopher Lloyd's wide circle of family and friends describe what Great Dixter means to them. Food, poetry, music and plants feature large with one guest recounting the delight of eating an exquisitely cooked turbot and another how a bloom of magnolia was analyzed with botanical precision during the course of dinner. Visitors remember the feel of the centuries-old floorboards underfoot, the thrill of waking early to peer out on topiary enshrouded in fog, and many describe how, in one way or another, Great Dixter changed their lives.

This valuable record encapsulates what makes time spent at Great Dixter in particular, and to some extent time spent in all gardens, so irreplaceable. It adds an important layer to our understanding of Christopher Lloyd's achievements and spurs us on to new heights in our own gardening endeavors.

I have just come back from a garden tour that included Great Dixter. I knew next to nothing about Christopher Lloyd and found the house and gardens to be my favorite of the tour. These reminiscences are so sweet and heartfelt. They remind me of a dear friend in Portland, Oregon who also came from a different time period where people took the time to be with each other and to share their loves of literature, music and gardens. These people were sensitive enough to know that they were being given the gift of looking back in time with someone who knew how to live in the moment.-- Carol LysekAlbany, Oregon

About the author (2010)

Founder and Principal of The English Gardening School at the Chelsea Physic Garden, London, Rosemary Alexander writes and lectures worldwide on garden design. She has worked on a wide range of gardens throughout the world. For eleven years she was tenant of the National Trust property, Stoneacre, in Kent, where she created a romantic, old world garden. She now lives in Hampshire where she has made a new garden.

Fergus Garrett joined Great Dixter as Head Gardener in 1992 and worked closely with Christopher Lloyd as gardener and friend during an important time in the garden's development. Now he combines his full-time, hands-on gardening role at Dixter with lecturing, writing articles, serving on Royal Horticultural Society committees and, as Chief Executive of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust, moving the garden forward in ever more exciting directions.